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Using Mouse-Made Sketches,
Retrievr Searches Flickr Photos

By

Aaron Rutkoff

Updated Oct. 17, 2006 12:01 a.m. ET

Text-powered search is so fundamental to life online that alternatives seem like far-flung fantasy.

Programmer Christian Langreiter, a 27-year-old Austrian, was hired by a European software company to make one alternative real. His creation: Retrievr, a search engine for images based entirely on visual input.

Retrievr sifts through photographs stored in Yahoo's Flickr database by using mouse-powered doodles as its search...